Christmas came one day late.

A special issue of the International Journal of High Speed Electronics and Systems dedicated to a previous symposium on terahertz spectroscopy and imaging applications has made its way into hardcover in the form of a Selected Topics in Electronics and Systems volume (Vol. 46). The original article was blogged on this site in post #50, including the abstract and a couple of figures from the article. The book reproduces all images in greyscale, although the cover image includes an HMX molecule in pixelated technicolor. In the interest of readability (had I known…), I’m posting the images here as a single pdf (3.0 MB).

According to amazon.com:

The inherent advantages and potential payoffs of the terahertz (THz) regime for military and security applications serve as an important driver for interest in new THz-related science and technology. In particular, the very rapid growth in more recent years is arguably most closely linked to the potential payoffs of THz sensing and imaging (THz-S&I).

This book presents some of the leading fundamental research efforts towards the realization of practical THz-S&I capabilities for military and security applications. Relevant subjects include theoretical prediction and/or measurement of THz spectroscopic phenomenon in solid-state materials such as high explosives (e.g. HMX, PETN, RDX, TNT, etc.), carbon-fiber composites, biological agents (e.g. DNA, RNA, proteins, amino acids) and organic-semiconductor nanostructures. Individual papers also address the effective utilization of state-of-the-art THz-frequency technology in military and security relevant scenarios such as standoff S&I, screening of packages and personnel, and perimeter defense. Technical papers introduce novel devices and/or concepts that enhance THz source and detector performance, enabling completely new types of sensor functionality at THz frequency (e.g. detection at nanoscale/molecular levels), and defining new and innovative sensing modalities (e.g. remote personnel identification) for defense and security. Therefore, the collective research presented here represents a valuable source of information on the evolving field of THz-S&I for military and security applications.

Get your copy HERE. In the right discourse community, it makes a great gift.

www.worldscinet.com/ijhses/ijhses.shtml
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation
www.worldscibooks.com/series/stes_series.shtml
www.worldscibooks.com/engineering/6608.html
www.somewhereville.com/?p=50
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMX
www.amazon.com
www.amazon.com/Terahertz-Technology-Military-Applications-Electronics/dp/9812771794/…

“As Wednesday morning dawned, northern Norway was hit with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.” – Nina Lødemel, www.aftenposten.no, June 9, 2006.

The old joke is that “the difference between mathematicians and physicists is that mathematicians stare at their own shoes, while physicists stare at other people’s shoes.” Given how insignificant much of the activities of humanity are compared to how much time major media outlets spend on them (note that I post this in the wake of having to listen to stories about Jamie Lynn Spears), it is perhaps not surprising that I didn’t find out about the above news story from any US media source, instead having to rely on my international news searches as part of my monthly research for astronomy-related news for the Syracuse Astronomical Society President’s Message.

Ponder the headline for a moment. Norway. Impact. Atomic Bomb. Those of us that prefer the freezing cold outdoors with our scopes to crowded indoors with beverages already know that debris falls into our atmosphere all the time. If you believe the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimate (and I see no reason not to), 1,000 tons of dust and debris fall to earth from space every year. A meteor shower is a predictable time to see matter speeding into our atmosphere and streaking across our field of view (which, of course, isn’t exactly correct, as the Earth is actually speeding into a debris field during meteor showers), but you can be sure to see 1 to 5 meteors an hour by simply being outside any night. So, ponder the following. What if that Norway meteor had been 6 hours later and 20 degrees lower latitude (that’s New York City, where I’m writing this post from). Or, perhaps, any other major populated area. Or, perhaps, just a location with a large enough population that a news story like the Norway impact would have made it beyond local headlines and a few internet news services. There are plenty of places to choose from if this map of human civilization is any indicator.

A random yet relevant quote from the movie Armageddon, 1998:

President: Dan, we didn’t see this thing coming?

Truman: Well, our object collision budget’s about a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and begging your pardon sir, but it’s a big-ass sky.

For the most part, humanity hasn’t developed far enough where the potential catastrophes from “above” (hence the shoe-staring humor) are of as much concern as the potential disruptions “on the ground.” I suppose, in the universal scheme of things, a species that hasn’t progressed to the point that it’s truly aware of its place in the universe and cognizant of the need to worry about the whole picture simply hasn’t developed far enough where it will make a dent anywhere else in the cosmos, is a long way from being consequential, and, therefore, not yet worth any another, sufficiently-developed species’ attention. We’ll have matured as a species when we concern ourselves more with our persistence beyond the statistical averages of stellar and cosmic phenomena than with resource squabbles here on Earth.

From wikipedia.org:

Existential risk is a risk that is both global and terminal. Nick Bostrom defines an existential risk as a risk “where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.”

Fortunately, small groups of people have at least begun to think about, and plan for, existential risks such as the “global killers” of rock and ice that couldn’t care less about the ongoing Writers’ Strike, the Presidential Primaries, or Global Warming. The stuff from “on high” isn’t our fault, so I think it something worth worrying about more than those things we do to ourselves, if for no other reason than intra-species conflict IS our collective fault and, as long as EVERYTHING is connected and EVERYTHING matters, someone can always connect the dots with James Burke-ian clarity to show that we somehow did it to ourselves.

With all that Christmas cheer in mind, I’m pleased to report my addition (click here for my snappy bio) to the Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the precious few organizations that is looking up and looking around in efforts to guarantee the persistence of our species. I’ve been acquainted with Lifeboat by way of their financial director, Michael Anissimov, for quite some time, both through his excellent Accelerating Future blog and through some lively interviews, including one at Podcasting The Singularity and another at RU Sirius‘ Neofiles Show. Of course, my addition is to the Nanotech and Chemistry Boards, nothing astrophysics-related, but what the hey…

From the Lifeboat Foundation website:

The Lifeboat Foundation is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization dedicated to encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.

Lifeboat Foundation is pursuing a variety of options, including helping to accelerate the development of technologies to defend humanity, including new methods to combat viruses (such as RNA interference and new vaccine methods), effective nanotechnological defensive strategies, and even self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail.

We believe that, in some situations, it might be feasible to relinquish technological capacity in the public interest (for example, we are against the U.S. government posting the recipe for the 1918 flu virus on the Internet). We have some of the best minds on the planet working on programs to enable our survival. We invite you to join our cause!

And keep your eye on Apophis.

www.aftenposten.no
www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1346411.ece
www.msnbc.msn.com
www.cbsnews.com
abcnews.go.com
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Lynn_Spears
www.syracuse-astro.org
www.syracuse-astro.org/pastupdates.html
www.usgs.gov
www.usgs.gov/sci_challenge.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_shower
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City
apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html
www.seti.org
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom
n.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Writers_Guild_of_America_strike
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_primaries
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burke_(science_historian)
www.k-web.org
lifeboat.com/ex/bios.damian.gregory.allis
lifeboat.com/ex/boards
lifeboat.com
www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael
www.bloggingthesingularity.com/2007/09/20/podcasting-the-singularity-01-is-heeeeeere
www.bloggingthesingularity.com/category/podcasting-the-singularity
mondoglobo.net/neofiles/shohw-78-immortality-or-oblivion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._U._Sirius
mondoglobo.net/neofiles
lifeboat.com/ex/boards#nanotechnology
lifeboat.com/ex/boards#chemistry
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis

Direct link to the Slidecast is available HERE. Local copy of Slidecast content is available HERE.

I am pleased to report that an abridged version of the talk I gave at the SME Nanosystem Roadmap Conference (containing one set of tooltip work being performed in collaboration with Eric Drexler and a second in collaboration with Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle) is now available as a slidecast at nanoscienceworks.org. By way of introduction, I posted about nanoscienceworks.org previously when the 2nd Edition of the CRC Handbook of Nanoscience, Engineering, and Technology was published, as the nanoscienceworks site is managed by the handbook publisher, Taylor and Francis. Nanoscienceworks.org is an information-rich place for nano-researchers (where a biography of your truly is located), publications, and nano-related news aggregated from various sources. Slidecasts are steered PowerPoint presentations with associated audio, all in Flash format for universal playability (I think they’re more generally referred to as screencasts, but they may be new enough that you can call your own label). Unlike a typical research talk, you have time to meditate on verbal content before committing to mp3 format, quite handy when you tend to fly through concepts or find yourself inundated with new research ideas as you walk through the slides and then find yourself jotting notes and leaving long quiet spells in the audio. And if the possibilities of Slidecasts tickle your fancy and you want a thorough range of examples to steal, er, borrow presentation ideas from, I recommend heading over to Bioscreencast.com, whose “About Us” is cohabitated by none other than the good Dr. Deepak Singh.

One revolutionary, and controversial, prediction of early nanotechnology research was the mechanical manipulation of atomic and molecular feedstocks, or mechanosynthesis. With laboratories now demonstrating atomic manipulation within covalent frameworks, computational chemistry is being employed for its predictive power in proposing and analyzing organic molecular frameworks capable of single-atom control and transfer. This slidecast on single atom manipulation and the chemistry of mechanosynthesis is presented by Dr. Damian Allis, Syracuse University and Nanorex Inc.

If, by some chance, you want to link to the Slidecast, please do so directly from the nanoscienceworks.org site and not primarily from here. I would not have produced it without their request and, like any all-encompassing nano-related website, viewers will likely find their site far more useful and educational than this one.

In the interest of time and space, I did reduce the size of the Slidecast presentation, leaving out a few slides that added some useful background but were not necessary to the overall scope of the talk. Just for the official record, I’ve included three additional slides and associated text from the original talk in the non-audio copy of the Slidecast sitting in somewhereville. To the content in the slidecast one might find useful additional information in Chris Pheonix‘s CRNano Live Blog of my talk.

Questions or critique, I’d be very interested in any comments anyone has. The field gets pushed forward with discussion and debate, so the more feedback the better (either as comments below or in emails which, if interested, I’ll then post).

…and if it were not enough to have his mechanosynthesis-affiliated self in the slidecast category, Robert Freitas received double billing for December with “Australia-U.S. Team Designs Test Bed for 3-D Nanorobots,” a post reporting his upcoming (January 2008) article in the journal Nanotechnology.

www.sme.org
www.sme.org/nanosystems
www.e-drexler.com
www.rfreitas.com
www.merkle.com
nanoscienceworks.org/slidecast
nanoscienceworks.org
www.somewhereville.com/?p=80
search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?r=1&ean=9780849375637
www.taylorandfrancis.com
nanoscienceworks.org/people/content/allis-damian-gregory
office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/default.aspx
www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3
www.bioscreencast.com
mndoci.com/blog
nanoscienceworks.org/slidecast/single-atom-manipulation-and-chemistry-of-mechanosynthesis
www.somewhereville.com/?page_id=99
www.somewhereville.com
www.xenophilia.org
www.crnano.org
crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2007/10/single-atom-man.html
nanoscienceworks.org/articles/australia-u-s-team-design-test-bed-for-3-d-nanorobots
www.iop.org/EJ/toc/0957-4484/19/1

After two years of development, the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems (TRPN) is now available for download. Much of what I had to say about the utility of the TRPN that might be of any interest or relevance found its way into the Guest Essay I wrote for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. One of the points I made mention of in nearly all individual discussions about the TRPN was the rapidity with which very new research areas (and researchers) were presented that, having not been represented at the first meeting, became integral to the tone and content of the final document. The significant expansion of the Working Group membership over the two years of development was another example of the rapid growth in research areas relevant to atomically precise manufacturing, and I take it as both motivating and surely non-trivial the extent to which the National Laboratories and affiliated researchers contributed content to a document that not only sees beyond the states of the various nanoscale disciplines, but begins to approach, in expectation, the foundational aspects of atomic and molecular control that marked the conceptual beginning of this field we now call nanotechnology.

From www.e-drexler.com:

Developments in the last 12 months show that the Roadmap is quite timely: As part of a study released last December, the U.S. National Research Council reviewed the technical analysis that I presented in Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation and called for experimental research in support of molecular manufacturing. Subsequently, DARPA issued a request for proposals for developing tip-based nanofabrication at the threshold of atomic precision, and the U.K. government announced grants to research teams developing nanomachines that can build materials molecule by molecule.

The Roadmap (2.4 MB) and Working Group Proceedings (14.5 MB) are, at this moment, available for immediate download from www.e-drexler.com, with other locations soon to follow. In addition to what I wrote in the CRN Essay, Paul Burrows from PNNL wrote a guest essay available at smalltimes.com, and the SME TRPN Launch in Arlington, VA this past October was blogged in great detail by Chris Phoenix at CRN.

www.foresight.org/roadmaps/index.html
www.crnano.org/archive07.htm#58Essay
www.somewhereville.com/?p=91
www.crnano.org
www.foresight.org/roadmaps/working_group.html
www.energy.gov/organization/labs-techcenters.htm
www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11752
www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html
www.darpa.mil/mto/solicitations/baa07-59/index.html
www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/October/19100701.asp#
e-drexler.com/p/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html
emslbios.pnl.gov/id/burrows_pe
www.pnl.gov
www.smalltimes.com/…/Roadmap-for-Productive-Nanosystems-rolled-out-at-two-day-workshop/
www.sme.org
www.sme.org/nanosystems
www.arlingtonva.us
crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2007/10/roadmap-confere.html
www.xenophilia.org

You’ve heard about it, you’ve read about it, you’ve seen it on color TV, you’ve even seen it streamed. The cover story in this month’s issue of ChemMedChem is a communication by members and collaborators of the Robert Doyle Group here at Syracuse University. The report describes the B12/TCII-based uptake of insulin, a process that occurs via the ingestion of a B12-insulin conjugate. In case you missed that, the delivery is oral, not by needle. For those of us that pass out at anything needle-related at about the time that the alcohol wipe is opened, that’s a positive step forward for getting rid of any syringe-related medicine altogether.

With the cover story comes the cover image shown above, a structure calculation on the insulin-B12/TCII complex. The bases for this structure can be found in the Protein Data Bank, including the TCII-B12 complex reported in PDB entry 2BB5 (the only hack in the structure calculation involved the replacement of the cobalt for iron to use already available bond parameters) and the insulin structure reported in PDB entry 1ZNI. The covalent attachment of the insulin to B12 can be found in the article. Structure manipulation was performed with a combination of NanoEngineer-1 and VMD, VMD being included in the mix in order to generate the ribbon renderings of the insulin and TCII protein backbones. As for the accuracy of the calculation, time and a synchrotron X-ray source will tell.

For much more information and numerous links to new stories related to the research in the article, I direct you to the group website of Robert Doyle and the various links to news stories available in his departmental publication list.

From ChemMedChem. Click HERE to go to the article.

From the website:

Cover Picture: Vitamin B12 as a Carrier for the Oral Delivery of Insulin (ChemMedChem 12/2007). The cover picture shows an orally active, glucose-lowering vitamin B12-insulin conjugate bound to the B12 uptake protein transcobalamin II (TCII). The inset shows a close-up view of the TCII binding pocket. (Insulin is in red; vitamin B12 is in bright yellow.) For details, see the Communication by T. J. Fairchild, R. P. Doyle, et al. on p. 1717 ff.

www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/110485305/home
chemistry.syr.edu/faculty/doyle.html
www.syr.edu
www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/117354616/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B12
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcobalamin
www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117354609/graphissue
www.rcsb.org/pdb
www.rcsb.org/pdb/explore.do?structureId=2BB5
www.rcsb.org/pdb/explore.do?structureId=1ZNI
www.nanorex.com
www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron
chemistry.syr.edu/faculty/doyle_group/index.html
chemistry.syr.edu/faculty/doyle.html#pubs